The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Leonard Part 6, a movie notorious for being one that Bill Cosby (despite his starring in it, producing it, and co-writing the story) promoted by endlessly slagging it off. Let it be known that, even before he turned out to be a sex offender of Biblical proportions, I never particularly cared for his wholesome brand of comedy. And I'm going to try and leave the 60+ accusers out of this as much as possible, but there's one point where I'm going to let loose, and I'll leave that part for the end, and even that will largely be a review for a much better movie.

• Why the fuck does it look like a child did the credits for this spy movie?
  
• How the fuck is that ostrich flying?
  
• Don't you just love it when they make a multi-part franchise and only let you watch it.
  
• "Eyes only?"
  
• It's Man Ray. Marcel Duchamp, Luis Bunuel, and Salvador Dali are presumably on other bases.
  
• That's supposed to be a rainbow trout?
  
• Since when is olive oil that clear?
  
• Undercover cook? Why the fuck does there need to be a
  
• Spoiler alert: the villain is basically an expy of Ayesha from H.  Rider Haggard's novel She. Why anyone thought the jungle opera and James Bond parody were two tastes that went great together is beyond me.
  
• Parapsychotic?
  
• Leonard only gives a shit about maybe getting his ex-wife back. Our hero!
  
• Oh, look, his daughter, who looks quite a bit like Lisa Bonet, is going steady with 66-year-old man. I think this is a reference to the controversy over Angel Heart. Go to the bottom and unhide the hide section to hear my thoughts about it.
  
• Gribbit? That's not how you transliterate a frog's croak. Also, I'm not sure if having a shitload of frogs leaping under a car and making it all go Chappaquiddick is as funny as the cars randomly dancing to the worst cover of a Brill Building hit I'd ever heard in Son of the Mask?
  
• I am not touching Leonard's "affair" with a 19-year-old girl with a ten-meter  pole.
  
• And of course, even when his bosses are going as far as hacking into his Jane Fonda workout tape to give him security briefings, he only gives a shit about making it with his ex-wife.
  
• Is it weird that I can't see a black man of a certain age wearing a Panama hat without thinking he might be a member of the Buena Vista Social Club?
  
• I'm sorry, I don't speak Albanian, can we at least know why that fortune teller is touching his face? 
  
• Did you at least break those ballerina shoes in? '
  
  
  Also, this is why I prefer women to be barefoot rather than wearing uncomfortable shoes. I suspect that Isidora Duncan didn't have to deal with shit like that once she stopped going en pointe in those slippers and started going barefoot with more natural movements.
• Yep, I'm going to count The Charge of the Light Brigade as a better movie that this movie's referencing.
  
• That's not how you conjugate "Amo."
  
• Also, by an extraordinary coincidence, Ravinia's doing the 1812 Overture tonight, except this time, the cannons have been replaced with 40 drummers for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who knows the Highland Park area. I'm not going because I've decided I'm only going to bother going to see their Tchaikovsky concerts again when they put "Capriccio Italien" on the bill.
  
• Ocelots (obligate carnivores) raising humans as vegetarians?
  
• So, Leonard's anaesthetising himself at a specific level so he can assist in his own surgery.  I don't know if I should reference Thack's fatal self-surgery in the series finale of The Knick or the constant low-level alcoholic buzz maintained in Another Round
  
• And is there a reason he's not letting his daughter know he's performing surgery on himself?
  
• Yep, that scene where she's randomly stripping is an obvious reference to Angel Heart. If you didn't look at the hide section before, do so now to hear me rant.
  
• I've seen several movies with killer rabbits (yes, there are killer rabbit movies besides Holy Grail) and this is easily the least intimidating one.
  
• Not-Ayesha went so far as to involve Leonard's wife (the only thing he seems to give a shit about) when she could have just stolen the sphere and not involved the only person who could stop him?
  
• He's not a college graduate because he didn't know about a Molybdenum catalyst? Dude, I didn't know shit about Molybdenum until long after I graduated college, and even then, it's mostly because of an early Direct Box that used a molybdenum transformer and an article about a milk-and-potato diet that contains
  
• So, can animals just understand English, let alone understand about the systems of oppression they've lived under for millennia?
  
• 1) Why does that stick of butter have sparkles on it, 2) that's not melted butter, it's softened butter. If it was melted, it wouldn't even be in a stick form. I should know, I've tried.
  
• You know, I love fucking with vegetarians as much as the next guy, but somehow, I don't think sticking a raw beef patty on them will cause those kind of burns.
  
• Also, fucking wow. Scanners had a legendary head explosion scene, but this movie has one where his head is apparently full of sawdust.
  
• And they didn't explain how that ostrich's wings could actually work.
  
• Did they actually explain what that red and turquoise liquid actually was in a scene I missed?
  
• You know, the sad thing is that closing song is actually fairly decent. And, of course, Tubi cut that off.
  

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Angel Heart is a great movie.  It's a unique mix of Religious Horror, Southern Gothic, and Film Noir in an ultraviolent package. It's a film so great that your friend and humble reviewer even went as far as preordering the 4K Blu-Ray release, even though I don't even have a 4K player. I bring this up because there was one big controversy: one of the most prominent female leads was played by Lisa Bonet, fresh off the success of The Cosby Show. She even had a sex scene that started off as steamy, but eventually got disturbing. It even ended up with... remember the threat Scorsese's character made in his cameo in Taxi Driver? That ends up happening. Why am I bringing it up here? Because Bill Cosby made a huge stink about it.  He got her fired from The Cosby Show because she had the gall to appear topless in the movie, having sex with Mickey Rourke, a man who was old enough to potentially be her father (and there's more to that if you actually watch Angel Heart). And given that the daughter in this movie looks a lot like Lisa Bonet, and I can even remember her wearing a similar outfit in the interviews on the DVD to the daughter in this movie. In an ordinary case, this sort of jab at a much better movie would just be petty, and something that I'd just devote a sentence or two to. Meanwhile, in the real world, while Bill Cosby was trying to put himself on such a high moral pedestal, in the two-year period before this movie was released, he committed (as far as we know) two rapes, two sexual assaults, and attempted two more assaults that failed because the women fled. And his complaining about her shacking up with a man of 66 is especially hypocritical given that, when he was around that age, he was raping Andrea Costand, Granted, Costand wasn't 19, but at least two of his accusers (in 1986 alone) mentioned he groomed them until he assaulted them when they turned 18.  And, you know what, say what you will about the age gap between, say, Lisa Bonet and Mickey Rourke, at least she consented to it. I can't remember finding any evidence that Alan Parker pushed her into doing anything she didn't want to do, even 35 years later.

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Next week, Monster, the Asylum's ripoff of Cloverfield, and, for Sting-related reasons, I'll be covering that Saturday instead of Sunday.